


Reading Between the Lines

by SectoBoss



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Army, Books, Dyslexia, Gen, Old World History, School
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-20
Updated: 2015-08-20
Packaged: 2018-04-16 08:37:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4618803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Sigrun, reading had never been as easy as everyone else found it. But since when was that going to stop her?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The condition I've tried to write Sigrun as having is supposed to be a severe case of visual stress syndrome, coupled with a mild dyslexia. I hope I've written an at-least-partially accurate description of both.

Sigrun knew from a very early age that words were never going to be her friends. 

That was how she thought of it, back when she was a little girl in Dalsnes. There had been no sudden revelation, no blinding realisation one day that for her things were different. Just the creeping understanding, cementing itself by the age of about ten, that the written word and her did not get on. For everyone else they lined up the page, neat and orderly like soldiers on parade, offering up their meanings gladly and without complaint. But for her, they didn’t. 

For her they used every dirty trick they could think of. They blurred and went fuzzy and dropped in and out of focus like they were trying to hide. Sometimes the lines on the page would bend and distort and she would become confused as to which one she was meant to be reading. On really bad days the whole picture would somehow invert herself and she would find herself looking at meaningless skeins of white on a black background, the words and the paper cruelly swapping places. And even when she managed to chase them down, usually by covering most of the page with her hand and focusing in on just a small cluster of them, they still refused to surrender. They’d throw up camouflage and smoke screens, disguising themselves as other words, so she’d look back at the page a few seconds later and see a completely different sentence from the one she thought she’d read. 

She’d tried to explain this to her teacher, an unpleasant frog of a woman called Mrs Odegaard who always stank vaguely of old sweat. Mrs Odegaard ruled the tiny school in Dalsnes with an iron fist and a wooden cane, marching up and down the front of the school’s single classroom and bellowing at any child she thought was misbehaving. But to Mrs Odegaard, any academic failure was the result of laziness and the cure for laziness was abject terror. And academic failures didn’t come much bigger in her book than failing to pass all but the most basic of the government-mandated literacy tests by the age of ten. 

Sigrun would never forget one cold morning in midwinter, huddled deep in an overcoat many sizes too big for her that was a hand-me-down from her sister, cowering at the back of the classroom and desperately reading one paragraph over and over. They were doing a class reading exercise, where they took turns to stand up from their battered desks and read a single paragraph from some old-world piece of trash about the world’s most boring family leaving their home in the city and going to live on their uncle’s farm for a pointless weekend. Sigrun had carefully counted the paragraphs and worked out which one she’d be expected to say, and had spent the five minutes it took the class to get to her working it out and memorising it. 

She’d almost got it when she heard Mrs Odegaard’s screech from the front of the class. “Very good, Einar. Next! Sigrun!” 

Sigrun’s head snapped up in horror as she realised they’d gotten to her too soon. “But… I thought it was Håkon’s turn!” she spluttered, pointing down to the other end of her row. 

Someone sniggered behind her and she felt her cheeks flush. “No, child,” Mrs Odegaard drawled, her voice dripping with contempt, “it’s you next. Can’t you count?” 

Sigrun understood in a flash what the old woman had done. She’d seen her trying to memorise her allotted paragraph and switched the order of the class on her. Anger sparked insider, white-hot. “This isn’t fair,” she muttered. 

“ _What was that?_ ” Mrs Odegaard asked, with a look that said it would be the cane if Sigrun dared actually repeat it. 

“Nothing, Mrs Odegaard,” Sigrun whispered, and got to her feet. Her hands barely poked out of the sleeves of her enormous coat and her voice was muffled by the collar that came up almost to her nose. She clutched the book and tried to find the new paragraph with her finger. The words shimmered and danced under her touch. 

“In your own time, Sigrun,” Mrs Odegaard said. This time there were a couple of quiet chortles. 

“I… ummm…” Sigrun desperately stalled for time. She thought she’d found it, now _what did it say?_ She was awfully aware of forty pairs of eyes boring into her, the rest of the class looking at her with barely-concealed disdain. _Come on, come on, everyone else can do this, why can’t you?_

From a few rows behind and to her left, a quiet, sing-song voice floated over the class. Sigrun recognised it as belonging to a nasty little troll of a girl called Marte Pettersen, who was the sort of person who wanted to be a bully when they grow up. “Sigrun can’t read, Sigrun can’t read,” she chanted softly, stretching the ‘read’ out into two syllables. _Sigrun can’t re-ead!_ A wave of laughter crashed around the classroom and Mrs Odegaard shouted for them to shut up. Sigrun cringed and blushed furiously, a hot, acrid feeling of hate burning a hole in her stomach. She would never feel more alone in her whole life than she did in those five short seconds when she was surrounded by mockery. 

In the few moments while their teacher was distracted, the mousy young boy who sat next to Sigrun – Erik Vennerød, his name was, and to this day Sigrun would happily throw herself in front of a troll for the man – grabbed her by the arm and whispered the first few sentences into her ear. Enough that, once Mrs Odegaard had regained control of the class, Sigrun could pretend to bumble through them and be asked to sit down before she got to the lines Eric hadn’t managed to give her. 

The experience was a formative one for Sigrun, not so much because of what happened but because of what happened next. She cornered Marte Pettersen and her friends in the playground that lunchtime with a cold sneer on her face and her fists clenched to conceal the jagged rocks in them. By the time she’d finished with her – by the time two adults had pulled her off the other girl – the snow around them was black with dirt and crimson with blood, and Marte would never see properly though her left eye again. 

She’d spent the next two days in the stocks for that, which she didn’t care about, and had been forced to pay weregild to Marte’s family, which she especially didn’t care about because it forced her to get a job at the local barracks. She dropped out of school and spent the next two years helping out in the mess hall and making friends with all the soldiers and never once having to read another gods-damned book. For the first time, Sigrun Eide found a place where she truly fit in, away from the stuffy schoolhouse and tedious lessons the rest of her peers were slogging through. And best of all, the only things she was expected to read were labels and the briefest of instructions – single words and sentences, in which the words had nowhere to hide from her. Some days, she could almost forget that she had problems with them in the first place. 

No, she didn’t care about her ‘punishment’ at all. What she did care about was her mother’s reaction when they finally released her from the stocks after two dreary days of embarrassed looks from passers-by. 

“I thought you wanted to be a soldier,” her mother had said to her in the kitchen that night, sat at the small wooden table with her hands clasped serenely on the dark oak. The medals and clasps on her uniform glittered in the candlelight. “I thought,” she continued in the same level tone, “you wanted to be an officer, and to lead people into battle.” 

“I do, mama!” Sigrun insisted. 

“And you think the correct response to a silly little girl making fun of you is to take her _eye_?” 

Sigrun opened her mouth to reply, saw the look on her mother’s face, closed it, and then opened it again. “I… lost my temper…” she muttered, looking down at the tabletop. 

“No you didn’t. You’re allowed to lose you temper, Sigrun. We don’t put people in the stocks when they lose their temper. What you lost, Sigrun, was _control_.” 

Somehow her mother’s calm, disappointed tone was infinitely worse than the magistrate’s dry proclamations or the screams of Mr and Mrs Pettersen. 

“Do you know what happens to soldiers who lose control, Sigrun? To soldiers who don’t think?” 

“No,” she whispered, still not looking up. 

“The trolls pull them limb from limb. Or the giants swallow them whole. And if they don’t…” Her mother let the sentence hang for a moment and a deathly silence hung in the air between them. “If they don’t get them,” she continued, “the other soldiers, the _proper_ soldiers, do. Because a soldier who can’t keep control, and worse, who takes their anger out on the people they’re supposed to protect, is _no_ use to anyone.” 

Sigrun was a believer in the old adage that promises were made to be broken. But as she tossed and turned in her bed that night, long after her parents had gone to bed and as their snores filtered through softly from the other room, she promised herself that she would never lose control of herself like that again. 

By and large, she kept it.


	2. Chapter 2

Sigrun was twelve when the last of the weregild to the Pettersens was paid and she quit her job in the mess hall. The soldiers of Dalsnes, who had grown rather fond of the hot-tempered young girl over the two years she’d been bringing them their food, put on a surprise leaving party for her on her last night. Two moments that night stood out for Sigrun – her first taste of mead, from a tankard surreptitiously passed to her by the head cook when no-one was looking, and the madcap few minutes when an enormous artilleryman called Gunnar swept her up onto his shoulders and carried her on a lap round the hall to the cheers and whoops of everyone else. He deposited her at the general’s table at the top of the hall – which was quite empty, all the generals having long since retired to bed – and loudly proclaimed to everyone that give this girl thirty years and she’d be sat at the table of her own accord. 

And with that, Gunnar – who would be torn to shreds by a giant’s claws just eight weeks later – had raised his mug and led a toast to ‘the future General Eide’, to which the rest of the soldiers of Dalsnes had joined in with a happy roar. 

After a send-off like that, Sigrun’s future was as clear as crystal to her. Six months later, on the afternoon of her thirteenth birthday, she sauntered back through the gates of the barracks with a kit bag slung over her shoulder and the biggest beam in the world on her face. As far as she was concerned, the only two words she needed to be able to read now were ‘Enlistment Office’. 

She passed the basic aptitude tests with flying colours, thanks to thirteen years of hide-and-seek and football and exploring the nooks and crannies of Dalsnes with her friends. She’d expected that to be that, and had been a little surprised to find herself sat in front of a Hospital Corpswoman a few days later. 

The woman, who looked about a hundred and five years old, had then proceeded to test just about every aspect of Sigrun’s physiology – eyesight, reflexes, coordination – in a series of tests that were as boring as they were exhaustive. Everything had been going well until the corpswoman had pulled a small book out of her desk, opened it seemingly at random, and asked Sigrun to read out the page she was pointing at. 

Memories of a chilly winter’s morning back in the schoolhouse had briefly flickered before Sigrun’s eyes. She scowled down at the crawling and shifting words on the page before her – _hi there! We’re back!_ , they seemed to say – before looking up at the old woman. 

“Oh come on,” she grinned in a manner she hoped was charming. “I don’t really need to prove I can _read_ now, do I?” she scoffed. 

The corpswoman had been a trainee teacher before the Rash came, and was of the opinion that the world may change beyond recognition but arrogant kids would be the same until the end of time. “Yes,” she said bluntly, “you do.” She had seen the records of this one – consistently terrible literacy, right up until she had dropped out of school. Privately, she had her suspicions as to the reason why. 

So Sigrun had stumbled and stammered through the jumble of letters as best she could, all the good cheer and hope of her first few days in the army suddenly evaporating, before the corpswoman asked her to stop. _This is it_ , she thought dismally, _no-one wants a soldier who can’t even read properly_. She had been ready to get to her feet, pack her kitbag and trudge back home, the heavy weight of failure like a collar round her neck, when the woman had reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a strange oblong of a clear blue material. “Now read through this,” she ordered, handing it to Sigrun. 

Sigrun took it and studied it closely. From the regular markings along its edge that had been crudely sanded down, she guessed it might be a ruler made out of that ‘plastic’ the oldworlders liked to make just about everything out of. “Why?” she asked tentatively. 

“Because it might help,” the corpswoman answered. 

A faint and nameless hope glimmering in her chest, Sigrun pressed the thin strip onto the page and peered through it – and her eyes went wide in shock. 

The words underneath the plastic weren’t moving any more. 

That was not to say that she could read them without effort. They still looked fuzzy and slightly out-of-focus in a strange way, and they still had the bad habit of rearranging themselves into other words here and there, but it was a vast improvement on the discordant jumble of letters that was the rest of the page that was not covered by the plastic. 

Sigrun had to fight to stop her jaw flopping open like some idiot North Sea fish and looked up in astonishment at the woman behind the desk. “Are… are you a mage?” she asked very quietly. 

The corpswoman cracked a very small smile at that, something which Sigrun had thought her incapable of doing when she had met her half an hour ago. “Not at all,” she said, in a way that implied she had very little time for such matters. She rattled off some medical-sounding terminology that Sigrun didn’t even begin to understand – or bother listening to – and invited her to keep the little piece of plastic. Sigrun didn’t need to be asked. The gods themselves would have had a difficult time wrenching the precious thing away from her. 

Sigrun Eide walked out of the office with a spring in her step so strong it was a wonder she didn’t hit her head on the ceiling. When she got leave that weekend she dashed home to tell her mama and papa the good news, and they both hugged her and ruffled her hair and, when she wasn’t looking, shared a look of deep relief. After all, a girl who couldn’t read properly would make a decent enough soldier regardless – but one who _could_ now had the chance to make it to the officer ranks, and maybe even to general one day. And that meant better food, better pay and better living quarters. 

And, of course, a much better chance of making it to retirement age. Which, deep down, was all they really wanted for their daughter, even as they clapped her on the back and boasted about how the trolls had better watch out now.


	3. Chapter 3

One would be tempted to think that would be the end of it. But for Sigrun, there was one more lesson to be learned, and it would come surprisingly late in life. 

It is simply this: sometimes, words will tell you things you don’t want to hear. 

On the face of it, it’s obvious. Sigrun was certainly no stranger to bad news written down. She’d seen plenty in her nineteen years of military service, both sent and received. The formal, apologetic government letters she got when her sister’s regiment was wiped out to the last outside Bergen, trying to hold back the tide that came crawling out of it in the summer of 84. Desperate pleas for reinforcements, scribbled out in her own crabbed handwriting – carefully messy so the letters couldn’t pretend to be others as easily – and passed up the line to their last living radioman as her platoon cowered in the ruins of Vossevangen, Swedish mortar rounds whistling through the air overhead and claws scrabbling against barricaded doors. 

But when she got those letters, or sent that message, or had to start writing her own letters of consolation after she made captain in 86, it was never too bad because she had always known what was coming. The disaster and heroism of Bergen had been in the news for weeks, and she had seen with her own eyes the reason for her to write those commiserations. Even if she wished she hadn’t. 

It was quite another thing for the written word to catch her completely off guard, as it did one winter’s evening on the outskirts of Copenhagen with the sun going down, the quiet sound of voices in the air, and everything going well for once. 

The sun had begun its descent a few hours and now the sky was streaked with orange and gold. The odd purple cloud lingered on the horizon, threatening bad weather in the days to come, but above them all was clear apart from a few ghostly wisps of cirrus. The snow fields stretched out all around them, tinged amber by the evening light. The air was so crisp Sigrun could almost taste it. 

If she was back in Norway, this would be the perfect time to break out a campfire and the mandatory bag of marshmallows and maybe a smuggled bottle of mead or two. She had good memories of spit-cooked meat and dancing embers and rings of faces illuminated by a fire’s sputtering glow, in those quick few hours between dusk and night when no-one had anything much to do but they didn’t have to worry about the night just yet. You sat around and you talked, about everything and nothing, pushed drinks into the hands of new friends and poured them out for departed ones. As the light faded, someone or other would always bring out the old stories and the ghost tales – the fading legend of the _Icerunner_ , the voices you heard in the Silent World static, the corpse-lights over the fjords. The shifting train wrecks of the Bergensbanen line that no two scouts ever reported in the same place. The things you glimpsed from convoy windows just as you were about to nod off that made you sit bolt-upright and crane your head to try and get a second look. 

Sigrun shivered and grinned at her reminiscences. A bunch of old soldier’s tales would be just the ticket right now, she thought glumly. And, of course, some old soldiers to share them with. But instead she was stuck out here in the Silent World with a bunch of _nerds_. 

They were sat back in the tank and just about every one of them had their nose buried in a book of some type or another. Mikkel was hunched over the desk, poring over some medical scrapbook or something they’d snagged from their very first run and which seemed to be occupying more and more of the big healer’s attention these days. Tuuri, Emil and braid-boy (what was his name again?) were sat a few metres away from him. Emil was lying down in his bunk, idly flicking through a battered magazine that seemed to be full of nothing but people with preposterously-well-maintained hairstyles. Tuuri and Braidy sat on the floor next to him, Tuuri reading aloud from a book in rapid-fire Icelandic. From what tiny scraps of the language Sigrun knew, it was something about a young boy who found a map for buried treasure on an island far to the south and set sail to find it without doing even the most perfunctory background checks on his crew – a decision that was in the process of coming back to bite him now that the leader of the pirates, a man who had silver long johns for some reason, was organising a mutiny. Sigrun would have thought that anyone who could afford undergarments made of silver was probably rich enough not to have to bother with piracy. Clearly the old world had been a strange place. 

Just about the only person doing anything normal was Lalli. Their night scout was curled up under the bunk Emil was lying on, sound asleep and snoring softly. It was a measure of her crew, she thought, when the weird little forest mage was the only one acting normally. 

_Well, why don’t you give it a go?  
_

The thought sprang fully-formed into her mind and for a moment she stopped and wondered if it was even hers. How long had it even been since she picked up a book? Her battered and dog-eared copy of _Troll Hunting_ – signed by the author, no less – aside, she didn’t think she’d even picked up a book in over twenty years before this expedition began. And she certainly didn’t feel any the poorer for it. She was about to scoff, to dismiss the notion out of hand, but some tiny voice at the back of her brain egged her on. _Go on,_ it said. _You might have the one interesting book in all of Denmark back there in the cargo hold. It’d be a shame to miss it._

Well, she thought, glancing back in at her team who all were still engrossed in their own activities, it wasn’t as if she had anything to lose. 

She sidled round to the back of the tank, as if she was somehow vaguely ashamed of her actions and didn’t want anyone to see her. Quietly she unclasped the lid of the nearest storage crate and began to leaf idly through the books inside. Most of them looked as boring as she’d suspected they would be – words like ‘economics’, ‘programming’, ‘nanotechnology’ and a hundred other old-world synonyms for ‘dull’. About halfway through she came across a small stack of plastic-sealed magazines with various scantily-clad women on the front, and made a mental note to keep a closer eye on what Emil was stuffing into their rucksacks and carry bags in future. Not because she had any particular objections to this kind of thing, mind you (although Sigrun was of the opinion that these old-world women were all a bit scrawny for her liking; none of them looked like they could deliver a good punch to save their lives). She was as guilty as the rest when it came to swiping old-world goods from abandoned buildings during her years with the hunters. But she’d have to take care they didn’t end up on a manifest somewhere down the line – that would just reflect badly on everyone. 

She was about to give up and trudge back into the tank when a book caught her eye and she hauled it out to get a better look at it. Now this looked promising, she thought to herself, turning it over in her hands. It was a thick, hardbound volume with what looked like plenty of picture plates inside. The words ‘Famous Battles of the 20th Century’ were inscribed in bold text over a black-and-white photograph of a group of soldiers climbing out of a trench and advancing across a twisted and broken landscape. 

Sigrun grinned. Old-world warfare! This should be interesting at the very least. It occurred to her, as she opened the book more or less at random, that she didn’t have the first clue about the armies of the old world. She knew there had been armies, some of them massive, but as for what they used or even what they had been used _for_ in a world without trolls and beasts and giants, she had no idea. 

She didn’t need the plastic as much these days – after two decades practicing with it she was usually good enough not to need it except for only the smallest, densely-packed print. Nowadays she kept it hung on a bit of leather around her neck as a good-luck charm. And as she flicked through the book and deciphered its grisly contents, a good-luck charm sounded like just what she needed. 

A cornucopia of old-world horrors spilled across the pages in her hands. Broken bodies ground into the mud by tanks. Ships burning on iron-grey seas. Corpses piled high in dusty city streets. Soldiers marching across unfamiliar landscapes – huge tracts of sand and thick jungles full of strange plants. Casualty figures larger than the known world casually noted and not dwelled upon. Ancient war, brutal, mechanised, cracking the earth open with bombs and splitting the sky with missiles and shells. All of this she was in theory no stranger to, but it was the creeping realisation – so slow for being so very alien to her – that all this had been directed _inwards_ , on other armies, upon soldiers like herself by soldiers like herself, that struck her. Those weren’t trolls being obliterated by incendiary rounds or cut down by flying machines. Those ships weren’t being dragged to the bottom by leviathans. 

With a feeling that wasn’t frustration and wasn’t curiosity but some strange fusion of the two – really, just a desperate need to know _why_ – she leafed through the book, looking with a kind of mad desperation for the reason why all this had been done. But she couldn’t find it. Maybe it was because it simply wasn’t as obvious as the reasons she knew. Modern armies fought for survival. Old armies fought for… what? Land? Food? 

_Fun?  
_

Sigrun shivered and closed the book. She got to her feet and stalked back outside, tossing the book back into the crate as she did so. Taking a few deep gulps of the crisp evening air to clear her head, she gazed southwards over the wreckage of Copenhagen. 

She wouldn’t say the old world deserved its fate. She had seen the Illness in all its forms and nothing and nobody deserved that in her book. But she did realise, as the sun sank over the broken stonework and rotten concrete of the city below them, that she was not sad to see it gone.


End file.
